What correlates with ‘good school’?
February 10, 2013 10 Comments
I’m always on the lookout for research to support my half-baked ‘good schools = less non-Asian minorities in the school’ theory (please read that link before getting mad, I’m not putting this forth as a matter of my own preference per se), and this might be an example.
…student test score performance will be positively related to the percentage of school district revenues raised from local taxes and with salary levels of school district administrators
Is a high ‘percentage of school district revenues raised from local taxes’ just a proxy for ‘less non-Asian minorities around’? I don’t know, but it might be.
At that link the blogger points out that the causality might be reversed and the research might have just dug up a correlation. What my theory suggests is that all discussion of ‘good schools’ is plagued by this problem, because all factors everyone looks at are just proxies for something no one is able or willing to talk about directly.
Richer parents correlate with better schools. Duh. Next insight, please.
Richer, and I would say more involved too. I bet “less non-Asian minorities in the school’” is a decent proxy for that too.
There is no doubt in my mind that causality runs the other way. A higher percentage of locally raised money indicates the value of the real estate surrounding the schools, since most school funding is done through property taxes. If a particular district can raise money above level “X” that get siphoned off by the state to support schools that can’t hit the X target with their property taxes.
Also, take a look at any large RC diocese. The RC schools that have the highest percentage of their operating revenues raised locally, particularly through fundraisers such as auctions, will also be the “good schools.” The same will correlate with the less NAM hypothesis. Particularly in hispanic heavy districts like Dallas.
And I’m aware that “I don’t know, but it might be” is just a trap to get me to comment. It worked.
Isn’t my whole blog just a trap designed to get people to comment?
I do agree with you about the causality re: property taxes.
However the reason I think my ‘theory’ is still alive comes from observing areas where there is perceived to be a HUGE ‘good/bad school’ disparity between two nearby locales, even though the *wealth* gradient is not anywhere near that dramatic. In the case I’m thinking of, a little research and I discovered what WAS a dramatic difference: the % of nonwhites (70+ vs <25).
Honestly curious, what areas are you talking about without a big wealth gradient but a big demographic swing? That would be something interesting to look at.
In Dallas we have the neat trick of having “Talented and Gifted” or Advanced Placement courses in various high schools around town. The students in these courses are uniformly white and NAM. It is done this way are there is a web of section 8 housing in the city. There are little strings/veins of the stuff everywhere.
I’ve always found these programs odd. If you talk to a kid that went through them, they had separate classes, hallways, lunch periods, everything. A word that comes to mind is “segregation.”
This was going on even before Barefoot Sanders died.
As to the point you made about schools being close to each other and the real estate looking the same. We have the same situation here. But the schools that are close are in different school districts. It gets complicated…
I think you’re onto something with the NAM percentage. Even the NAM’s know this.
That should be “uniformly white and AM.”
Good schools correlate with one thing the most: good students. And the causality is, obviously, circular.
Under a regime that allows migration, freedom will always and irrevocably translate into disparate outcomes across identifiable groups. The greater the freedom, the greater the disparity of outcomes. Show me a low disparity of outcome, and I’ll show you a largely homogenous population or an iron-fisted dictatorship… or both.
In the previous post, your argument that “good schools” means “few minorities” was that parents cannot really think that a tiny difference, such as between the 98th and 99th percentile, corresponds to such a difference in school quality that other considerations don’t overwhelm it. Instead, you postulate that they think of it as a proxy for race.
The flaw in this argument is that the same thing can be said for race. Wouldn’t a difference between the 98th and 99th percentile, a very small difference, imply (when used as a proxy for race) a similarly small difference in race between the two schools, a small difference that other considerations would still overwhelm?
I don’t know. Would it?
Imagine parents have nothing else to go on, except a bunch of stats that are 1% apart. So they use the stats as a fuzzy/weak (but still with some signal) indicator of some background/hidden variable they’re not supposed to be observing directly. Doesn’t this make more sense than the notion that they actually care so much about maximizing the stats themselves that they’ll do anything to reach for that last 1%?
It might not be race that they’re worried about, but it’s *something*, and I’m unaware of other candidates. Perhaps you can say it’s ‘culture’ but of course that has a lot of overlap with race. Either way I do find it implausible that what people care about is the actual variable they are all supposedly paying attention to. For example, average test-score-increase: school A = 100, school B = 101. ‘Therefore I’m going to pay an extra $200k to buy a house in school B’s area so that 10 years from now my kid’s Expected Test-Score-Increase will be higher by 1%!’ I dunno, it just doesn’t work for me. Maybe I’m the dumb one.